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Women's Studies Symposium 2012 Guest Speakers

Stephanie Eckroth, PhD, Baylor University

Named the 2011 Pantzer New Scholar by the Bibliographical Society of America for her
research on gender and authorship in the Romantic novel market, Stephanie Eckroth
earned her PhD from Texas Tech and currently is a Lecturer at Baylor University. Her
dissertation on anonymity, celebrity, and authorship in the Romantic period was awarded
the Outstanding Dissertation in the Humanities Award from Texas Tech and also earned
her the Paul Whitfield Horn Professors Graduate Achievement Award. She has published
articles on women writers and authorship during the Romantic period. She also serves
as the Assistant Editor for the multi-volume Romantic Women Writers Reviewed (Pickering
& Chatto, 2011-present).

Presentation Title: What’s in a Name?: Women Writers in the Nineteenth-Century Book Market - The longest standing myth about female authorship in the Romantic period comes from
Virginia Woolf’s statement that “For most of history, anonymous was a woman.” For
scholars of Romantic period in Britain, this image of the faceless woman writer churning
out novels in shame and obscurity dominates our rhetorical discourse about the motivations
behind female authorship after the 1790s. But this myth does not match the realities
of production in the Nineteenth-century book market. Women writers not only publically
acknowledged their works often more frequently than male writers, but their very names
were marketable and profitable commodities. This presentation examines the economic
and material conditions of book production in the Romantic book market.

Ann R. Hawkins specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, where
she publishes on the book trade. Her research focuses include the History of the Book,
Textual Studies, and the field of Bibliography--which is the study of the 'sociology
of the book.'

As a textual scholar, she has published scholarly editions of three nineteenth-century
novels: Benjamin Disraeli's Henrietta Temple and Venetia and Marguerite Gardiner,
Countess of Blessington's Victims of Society. Hawkins has published articles on Disraeli,
nineteenth-century women poets, and Lord Byron. She is the editor of the Byron Chronology
which traces daily events in the life of George Gordon, Lord Byron, available at Romantic
Circles web.

She has published a well-received collection of essays on pedagogy: Teaching Bibliography,
Textual Criticism, and Book History, Her Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity
in the Long Nineteenth-century, a collection edited with Maura Ives will appear from
Ashgate Publishing in early 2012. She is the editor of the ground-breaking Romantic
Women Writers Reviewed, 1788-1819, a 24-volume series which collects and edits reviews
written of women published in the British periodical press, 3 volumes of which appeared
in 2011 from Pickering & Chatto); and a book manuscript, “Byron and the Shakespeare
Trade,” part of the research for which was featured in an exhibition at the Folger
Shakespeare Library in fall 2007. She has received grants and fellowships from the
Helen Jones Foundation, the Edinburgh Centre for the History of the Book, The Folger
Shakespeare Library, and the Bibliographical Society of America, among others. She
is series editor for Pickering & Chatto's Book History monographs.

Maura Ives is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, College Station.
A specialist in bibliography, book history, and textual studies, Ives’s research focuses
on the experience of women writers in Victorian print culture. She is the author or
co-editor of three books, including Christina Rossetti: A Descriptive Bibliography
(2011), and has published articles on Victorian literature, bibliography, and publishing
history in such journals as Textual Cultures, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies,
Studies in Bibliography and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.

Presentation Title: Books as Women, Women as Books: Gender and Book Design in the 19th Century - 19th century discussions of book design frequently represent the book as a body
to be clothed, with emphasis on what constituted a "suitable" covering for the naked
text. Insisting that the visual and material forms of a book should be linked to its
content, and using gendered adjectives such as "chaste" and "sober" to praise successful
design, Victorian commentators imply that the book's body is female: Victorian books,
like Victorian women, were most valued when they expressed the purity and value of
their bodies through appropriate coverings, eschewing "showy" display. Over the course
of the century, women's authorship complicated the design and marketing of books,
doubly gendering them as bodies in themselves, and as representatives of the author's
own female body. Drawing examples from the Romantic and Victorian literary periods,
I explore the various ways in which book design, especially (but not exclusively)
book findings, reflects contemporary expectations and anxieties about the beauty,
propriety, and integrity of the female author's body and text.

Jodi Thomas, MS, Writer in Residence, West Texas A&M University

A fifth generation Texan who taught family living, Jodi Thomas chooses to set the
majority of her novels in her home state, where her grandmother was born in a covered
wagon. A former teacher, Thomas traces the beginning of her storytelling career to
the days when her twin sisters were young and impressionable. Honors & Awards include;
won a RITA for Welcome to Harmony (2010) and the Booksellers’ Best Award for Somewhere
Along the Way (2010), The Lone Texan won the Reader’s Choice 2009 Best Western Romance
from Love Western Romances.com, received the National Readers’ Choice Award for two
of her books: Twisted Creek (2008) and Tall, Dark and Texan (2008), and was the 11th
woman to be inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame for winning
her third RITA in the category of short historical romance for The Texan’s Reward
(2005).

With a degree in Family Studies, Thomas is a marriage and family counselor by education,
a background that enables her to write about family dynamics. Honored in 2002 as a
Distinguished Alumni by Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Thomas enjoys interacting
with students on the West Texas A & M University campus, where she currently serves
as Writer In Residence. Commenting on her contribution to the arts, Thomas said, "When
I was teaching classes full time, I thought I was making the world a better place.
Now I think of a teacher, or nurse, or mother settling back and relaxing with one
of my books. I want to take her away on an adventure that will entertain her. Maybe,
in a small way, I’m still making the world a better place."

Binding Equality: A Women's Studies Symposium

Funding provided by the Education Division at the Museum of Texas Tech University

8:30 am - Morning Refreshments (Check In)

8:45 am - Welcome

9:00 am-10:00 am - Session I

10:00 am-10:15 am - Break

10:15 am-11:15 am - Session II

11:30 am-12:00 pm - Guided Gallery Talk & Tour

Background

The Women’s Studies Program is proud to announce "Binding Equality: A Women's Studies
Symposium" in collaboration with the Museum of Texas Tech University during the month of March (Women's History Month).

The committee would like to send out a special thank you to Ann Hawkins, PhD, Professor, English, Texas Tech University for coordinating and curating the
exhibition as well as her support in forming this Symposium